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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I have two PCs on which I installed Slackware 14 onto a clean, formatted / partition. Not surprisingly on these machines everything is working fine. On one other machine however I followed the upgrade instructions. Everything seems to have worked fine except for access to commercial film dvds. Data dvds work OK in the same drive and audio cdroms also work fine. At least four players (xine, kaffeine, vlc and mplayer) all essentially say they cannot read the movie data from /dev/dvd. Messages from vlc are shown below:

Quote:

libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 4.2.0
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.11 for DVD access
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading
libdvdnav: vm: failed to open/read the DVD
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.11 for DVD access
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading
[0xb39027f0] dvdread demux error: DVDRead cannot open source: /dev/dvd
[0xb6e00618] main input error: open of `dvd:///dev/dvd' failed

Installed versions of relevant libs are:
libdvdcss: 1.2.11
libdvdnav : 4.2.0
libdvdread : 4.2.0
which I think are all the standard slackware 14 versions. To be sure I re-installed all these from distribution cds. I also started to suspect udev and udisks so re-installed these. None of this has had any benefits. /dev/dvd remains unreadable when it contains a dvd film.

Just to make things more interesting I have found one single dvd in my collection (OK, I have only tried with about 6 different ones) that does play. This is what is largely regarded as Stanley Kubrick's worst ever film - Eyes Wide Shut!

I suspect there is a pesky .conf file somewhere which I should have overwritten with its ".new" equivalent during the upgrade, but I have not been able to find it.

I think this has now become a hardware problem and is therefore "solved". After re-installing all my libdvd* libraries and my udev and udisk* libs, when I attached a usb DVD Drive, all DVD movies played OK on the external drive. So I thin it's down to the old internal DVD drive in the PC. It does still seem to be capable of reading data DVDs. Are the hardware requirements for reading data DVDs less demanding than the requirements for reading movie DVDs?